Our latest assignment in my acting class has been working on scenes where we play characters that are against our “types” or how we are typically cast. Overall, I have had a positive experience with this assignment, but somethings have bothered me. It all started with one day when this one guy in my class, who is not well liked, asked whose type is the big, powerful, and can be villainous. Without thinking about the fact that if I respond that I will most likely end up scene partners with him, I mentioned that is my type. Just like that, I became scene partners with this kid that I really didn’t want to. I was looking forward to the experience though because I thought that it would be a helpful experience to work with someone that I may not have a huge desire to work with. We started thinking of scenes that we wanted to work on. I very quickly thought of the play True West because the whole theme of the play is the differences of versions of masculinity. The two versions of masculinity that these characters in True West represent feel like they played into both of our types. This made it easy to then switch and we had our against type scene! In our scene, I would play the Austin, a mild mannered screenwriter trying to get his big break, and my partner would play Lee, the gruff thief with very little respect for anything. Something interesting happened though because when we talked to our teacher to ask him his thoughts. He suggested that we switch these roles. Trusting his judgment, we did so.

            Once we decided on True West, we started rehearsing. This is where my partner started to wear on my a little. Not horribly, but enough to mention. Overall, we had good rehearsals, but he would get distract rather easily and start telling anecdotes about his other experiences as an actor that were barely related to what we were doing. When we were discussing the text, our characters, and what we would do in the scene we got some good work done. Then he would tell a story. Part of the problem with the things that he would talk about that were unrelated was that he would begin complaining about the theatre department at SUU and compare it to the community college that he previously attended. It got to the point one day that I snapped at him. I couldn’t handle him complaining any more about the school that he chose to attend. The worst part about this was that we hadn’t even started rehearsing! So then, after I snapped at him we still had to work! There really wasn’t any hindrance to our rehearsal, but I couldn’t handle him complaining any more. I’m excited to perform this scene because it is a good scene, but I am ready to be done with these rehearsals.